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You should know better . You’ve
been here long enough. Wasn’t it back in 31 when you hopped
the Idlewild on Rose Island and stowed away to Louisville, the
Fontaine Ferry Gun Shy still ringing in your ears? They changed her name to
Avalon and you still hung on, through the floods of 37 and the winds of 74
and here you are, in 1992, about to get hit by a train, a creaking hulking
stealthy truck of wonder called ‘Rusty’. You should know better than to be over
Floyd’s Fork Creek this time of night. Unique acoustics round here. You can’t
hear the trains coming. You won’t see the Pope Lick Monster til the
last moment. Till his syphilitic blue eyes roll over white . . .
.blue over white, water over foam over water over foam and the deluge keeps on
coming: rotate yourselves downriver and ask what is it about this
place that means the music it makes is so clear, so engulfed, so utterly out on
its own? You may have been told that Louisville sounded like Squirrelbait
first and then sounded lik…

“Happy daze - I hear the Seekers and the Sex Pistols and Val Doonican and it all sounds the same. I also hear this song and I realise that music can make me cry and choke. This song is about moonlight, shelter, looking in the mirror and not seeing yourself looking back. It's by Maharashtrians of a similar vintage to my parents, Hridaynath Mangeshkar and his sister Lata, a familial combination that created gold whenever it collaborated... but at age five I knew none of this. I just knew it felt funny, that this song woke and walked into new chambers of my still-growing heart, instrumentation I couldn't quite picture that pulled the brine from your eyes in pure melodic yearning and sent you on through your day levitating a few inches a…

I've never had much of an idea exactly what the fuck's going on in alot of the soundclash tapes that have ever come my way, but I do know that's partly why they so often excite me. I know that sense of WTF is what's always excited me about all Saxon Sound tapes - listen to any (and there's dozens) Saxon Sound clashes from the early 80s on Youtube (particularly rich pickings tween 82 & 85 by which time SS gained an 'official' release on the awesome 'Coughing Up Fire' album) and you're confronted with the necessity of having to totally overhaul the official version of British music you've been reared and raised on. Of course, when reading any history you look between the lines, you look at what's been left out, particularly in any history of UK music, this entity so splayed and lashed and divided by lines of class and race it's a temptation to forget about what doesn't get heard any more, and just to be grateful for what can …

OK, here's what we know - next to fuck-all. 2 years ago, New Years Eve 2012, a mixtape dropped called 'Syrup Splash'.

It was fucking great. The sleeve and the mystery behind its creators led alot of people to suspect the perpetrator was Caucasian (like that would be a crime), soubriquets like 'tumblr-rap' started getting slung its way, the confusion of listeners as to whether SMT was black or white getting a whole load of hipsters' knickers in a knot. Didn't help that SMT's web presence was ghostly, fuzzy, refused to skewer reality and play the usual games of instant explication, refused to give much info beyond suggestions of a collective, that Paper Platoon was the producer (or was that just another pseudonym of SMT himself?). The music PP spun around SMT's slow-mo'd raps (all of his vocals are sluggishly drawn out to a crawl), though peppered with identifiable tropes (air-horns, trap beats, DJ-rewinds), somehow emerged as utterly unique, t…

BölzerAura EP(Iron Bonehead Productions)
In a permanent state of catch-up with metal from 2013 - missed alot and I'm sure alot was worth missing but my god, this 23 minute slab of rarefied riffola from Swiss duo Bölzer is just astonishing, so good it doesn't feel absurd to call it a new high-point in metal, something WAAAY too good to just sadly note and prod people towards, a record I want to press into strangers lives with evangelical fervour. It's a total and utter stone cold red hot freakin masterpiece, addictive, a record I can't stop listening to, loud. Sometimes it's easy to seek controversy or revelation where there is none, insist that something 'progresses' or 'moves on' a genre - what's wonderful about 'Aura' is that it's so fucking good none of that even occurs to you, it just does what it sets out to do so bri…

Decided to start compiling the stuff I write about into a little mix every season. Here's the first instalment. There'll be another along anon. Also on my Mixcloud page are my 'Spare Hours' mixes which are all old stuff. Enjoy.

LILY ALLENAIR BALLOON(Regal/Parlophone)
Why just one single this month? Too busy, too knackered, too much to hear, too little time. 'Air Balloon''s a handily emblematic release for my purposes. Everything that's wrong. An invulnerable humourless vanity masquerading as self-deprecation, the endlessly renewable get out clause of sarcasm you'd be idiotic 'not to get'. You feel like a relic even getting angry these days. Always 'witty', a never-off wit too witless to apprehend its own tiresomeness. A 'character' - characters are who we're meant to want in pop, difficult when all it means is being a gobshite, being good for a 10-second celeb-news item or pull-out quote guaranteed to annoy enough people into clicking their way, This is who she is, and who you are. Tethered to this device that so bullies your time it has begun to shape and sculpt your consciousness. When was the last time you dimmed the lights, let music not merely mingle with…